L.R. Harvey Poetry

LOCALIZING It’s the slow work of tightening  the circle, one concentric ring  at a time: feed from Jody’s Farm Supply, who is Edwin Kathy’s second cousin; eggs from Hillwood— a friend’s farm—until the chickens brood;  Tuesday morning readings at the  Chickamauga Library. Eventually  you begin to discover the secret of being self-sustaining, which is the awakening  to how little sustaining happens by yourself, how little the self  whose end is simply to sustain.  Given time enough, you might begin  to write poems that open to nothing more  universal than the morning's mushrooms opening beneath the Japanese maple,  or the Wat Buddha Monadham temple  so oddly placed off Davis Lane, ringed by Baptist churches and  the odd Confederate flag.  If you refuse to leave and dig  in,  you might even find yourself one day worshiping the local god who dwells no further than the temple of the tomato plant, whose delight is creek-chant and  the incense of fresh-cut grass.

TRANS-PLANT Moving here, we had our  doubts we knew what we were  doing: how to garden, how to raise chickens or a family, the difference between a beech tree and an oak, what it would be like  to live both further out and closer to the ground. Still, we decided to send our shoots deep into the clay, not knowing much about roots  but just enough about words to trust the principles translate: The shallow ones  pop when pulled. Toss them in the compost heap. Worm food. Even if buried in  the wrong place, requiring   some sweat and some skin  off your fingers, the deep ones come up whole. This means they aren’t dead yet. This means they can be kept,  brought home, replanted.

THE FRONT PORCH When I look at the land  from here I can see where the vineyard will go, the rows of apple trees,  a secluded spot for a few bee- boxes. A place like this  recalibrates your vision to think in five or ten-year increments,  so when I heard the door click and she came outside to say  she felt Eden stirring within her,  I said I knew what she meant, but she said she was positive I didn’t, and then I really did.  We sat together on the front step, then, our feet dangling over  the precipice as we stared out on a life we could just barely imagine, like a garden we’d never seen before but held close as an unborn child.

REDEFINING I wouldn’t call myself a prepper,  but I don’t laugh anymore at those who whisper of a dark mass gathering there, just  below the horizon line.  And is it odd if I no longer find conspiracy theorist a fair label  for one who acknowledges  that with so much silt in the  water it's foolish to say with certainty what big fish is stirring it up?  I don’t think living in fear is what I’m doing when I don’t teach my daughter that we know for sure  what keeps to the shadows in the woods behind our house, that I wouldn’t advise her to go chanting beneath a hemlock tree.  And would I be a fool if sometimes I still  go to bed with a strange lightness,  because by this line of reasoning there’s  a good chance that it’s more  than the carbon dioxide from our  breath that makes the plants  grow when we speak to them?

COMMON FIELD Sure, good fences make good  neighbors, but no fences makes good  conversation about who mows what, because with the easement  where it is it makes more sense that yall continue to take care of that strip,  which we’re okay with as long as you are,  and—not that it matters— yall know that it belongs  to us, and we could plant a garden there if we wanted to.  No fences comples us to  confront how awkwardly our  lives so intimately inter- sect in this field we share,  how between your family, ours,  and Eddie and Cathy on the hill,  we’re not as clearly defined as we’d like to imagine,  how really—mid-finger-point down the blackberry hedge growing along the property line—one might come    to taste how silly we sound,  pretending to own even the cluster of words purpling as the weather warms, tart and sweet on the tip of our tongues. 

WEEDING She wears my straw  hat and stands at my elbow like a little mushroom  opening to morning light. I drop weeds in her bucket, and she  drops dirt, bye-bye, flower, house , like word-spores  to the wind. We paint then  with our feet, dark dew-strokes  towards the compost heap,  her hand root-wrapped around my finger. The hope is she’ll remember this, deep someplace, grow to love the earth and earth-maker, to kneel, to know the slow work of the daily return to care for what we’ve planted.

CREEK-WALK EPISTLE To the mosquito-bitten  brethren on this side of things, pacing as they tentatively eye the froth and swirl of the times: Ten exhortations of a rock-hopper,  fellow seeker of the firm  over which to ford  this swollen stream of ours:    Go, but not alone. This current  isn’t safe. You’re not  the sure-footed exception  you think you are.  Still, don’t follow  another too closely. It clouds your vision. Allow a little  space for the silt to settle.  You're flesh, remember?  don’t crawl or stand over- straight. If you’re confused,  emulate the willow.  Posture is important here.  Pay homage to the salamander king whose country you are passing through.  If this feels silly or beneath you,  check that posture again.  Remember that flat stones— inviting as they tend to look— are typically slick. Get some momentum without knowing your next foot-fall. At least you’re going somewhere. So is the water:  somewhere big, and bigger.  Maybe it doesn’t matter  if you fall in.

TO KEEP ONSELF UN-STUBBED Pure and undefiled religion  will run you fifty bones  for a roll top desk you don’t want but the widow wants gone  because she found him there.  Given that it demands your entire afternoon and that it goes so far as to require you to take the door  off its hinges, logically  you shouldn’t have to pay  the widow to help her out,  but then the widow isn’t  logical right now and neither is pure and undefiled religion.   What you’ve acquired  smells like mold and cat piss  and won’t fit in the vehicle you  brought to carry it. Remind me  to wear closed-toed shoes next time I try to tread the narrow way.

KEEPING BOX A place to return and remember, blue Tupperware ebenezer that even with intentions as absurd as being seen  as better than a brother or a sister,  of elevating your image over theirs on the refrigerator, hands  are there to receive whatever  poor thing you’ve made of your time, saying in the way  only love can without lying,  Thank you—it’s beautiful.

HOUSE DECOR AND OTHER LIES Leaves of glass shimmer like silver tongues  in the lamplight of the living  room, lingering in the corner  beneath the TV loop of somewhere green and dangerous. You don’t need to water them. They don’t hold mites or give you a rash  when you carelessly brush  against their smooth edges.  Sure, they don’t shade elephants  or grow tomatoes, but you can see  these on the TV loop or buy  them cheaper at the grocery store.  And really, given the state we're in, who are you to reach for and consume the limited light?

HOW I FIRST CAME TO KNOW YOU: II This, then, is how you should pray  in a house full of boys:  Our Brother, playing tag perhaps, or wrestling  haphazardly around the living  room, ignore the weary voice  saying keep your hands to yourself.  Take me instead in an armlock  and toss me into a table to shake  loose the dim lamp I see by. In the silence after the shatter, don’t say    something about needing to go.  Don’t leave me there, alone    and in the dark, but keep watch as I hit my knees to gather in the pieces.  And when I open myself, crying  out a harmony to the song  trickling on the carpet in its slow, persistent melody, get dad.